Barely a half-year after the
world was stunned by the September 11 terrorist attacks, Holocaust
survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel offered a simple but
almost impossible antidote for evil. “We must first fight indifference,”
he told the 32 million readers of Parade Magazine.
“Indifference to evil is the enemy of good, for indifference is the enemy
of everything that exalts the honor of man. We fight indifference through
education; we diminish it through compassion. The most efficient remedy?
Memory…To live through catastrophe is bad; to forget it is worse” (Wiesel
5).

Though his memories of
imprisonment under the Nazis are half a century old, Wiesel still uses
them to speak out against hate and fanaticism in all forms. We need his
voice. Wiesel, now age 74, and other living survivors of the World War II
Holocaust will soon perish. Then only books, articles, television
specials, and museums will remain to educate about the Holocaust. While
these last voices remain, we must use them to emphasize to the next
generation the immutable value of human life.

The Nazis killed in gas
chambers. The Taliban puppets turned passenger jets into projectiles of
death. In between these two events other holocausts have raged from South
Africa to Bosnia, from Colombia to Cambodia, and from Israel to Rwanda.

In 1994, in Central Africa,
a Rwandan holocaust seethed out of tribal lines. In a mere one hundred
days, 800,000 lost their lives. The genocide flared up from a
centuries-old conflict between the Hutu majority and the Tutsi minority.
Hutus, making up roughly 85 percent of Rwanda’s population, are
characterized by stocky builds, round faces, dark skin, flat noses, thick
lips and square jaws. The Tutsi have lanky bodies and long faces.

The stage for tribal
genocide was set when decisions were made that held strong parallels to
the Holocaust. In the 1930’s, while Nazis forced European Jews to wear
yellow stars, colonial Belgians imposed ethnic identity cards in Rwanda (Gourevitch
56-57). By discouraging diversity, this Rwandan decree further divided the
races. Then, four decades later, in April 1994, a missile downed a plane
carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi. In the power vacuum that
followed, Hutu extremists seized their chance, set up roadblocks, and
began to look for Tutsis to kill.

Armed only with hoes,
machetes, and hatred, the Rwandan killers slaughtered people five times
faster than Nazis during World War II. The United Nations (U.N.), after
primetime television showed 18 U.S. Rangers dragged to death after a raid
in Somalia, sought to avoid another “bloody African adventure” (The
Triumph of Evil). This same organization, after World War II, had promised
that the world would “never again” allow a Holocaust. Despite several
emergency cables from commanders for the U.N. African Mission in Rwanda,
the event was dismissed as a “breakdown of cease-fire” and the U.N. voted
to withdraw troops from the area (The Triumph of Evil). That decision only
allowed the African holocaust to rage on, verified by gruesome reports of
atrocities and corpses floating downstream.

Ironically, just a year
earlier, then-President Bill Clinton had officially opened the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. There he told
survivors, “The evil represented in this museum is incontestable, but as
we are its witness so must we remain its adversary in the world in which
we live” (The Triumph of Evil). Such words proved empty when world
peacekeeping forces abandoned the Rwanda genocide.
Karel Kovanda, Czech U.N. Ambassador at that time, reflected, “When one
comes from central Europe, one has a sense of what holocausts are all
about. You recognize one when you see one. A lot of my father’s family
perished in the Holocaust.” Then, asked if Rwanda’s genocide represented a
holocaust, Kovanda replied, “Oh yes, definitely. There it was happening
again” (The Triumph of Evil).

Ethnic killings do more than
fill graves. They scar the hearts of survivors, often children who must
deal with questions of hatred. Gizella Abramson, who survived the Majdanek
death camp, didn’t remember the beatings which scarred her body as much as
“the expressions on the faces of my tormentors and what they said” (Scher
53). Half a century later, a young Rwandan survivor, Valentina Iribagiza,
told how she pretended to be dead when Hutu extremists attacked yet knew
how the attackers crushed people’s skulls with stones, even smashing
children’s heads together. “When they found someone breathing, they pulled
them out and finished them off,” she said. “They killed my family. I saw
them kill my papa and my brother but I did not see what happened to my
mother” (The Triumph of Evil).

Besides the stories of
horror, we must tell the stories of valor. When Jews and other "undesired
people" arrived at the foreboding gates of Auschwitz on cattle cars, they
passed under the ironic sign that declared "WORK MAKES YOU FREE.” Those
not sent immediately to gas chambers endured hard labor to wear down their
resistance. Some dared to protest, like Roza Robota, who helped smuggle in
dynamite to blow up Auschwitz’s Crematorium IV. Just before she and the
rest were hung for this action, she cried out in Hebrew to witnesses,
“Hazak v’ ematz!” (Be strong, have courage!) (Nieuwsma 87). In the
Netherlands, though not Jews themselves, Corrie ten Boom and her family
courageously turned their home into a “hiding place” for Jews seeking
refuge. Raided by the Gestapo in 1944, the family was sent to the
notorious Ravensbruck death camp. Only Corrie survived because she was
released through a clerical error. She spent the rest of her life, until
her death in 1983, telling the world how her Christian faith enabled her
to persevere and later to forgive her oppressors (Woodbridge 84-89).

Today, death is silencing
the voices of those who survived the Holocaust of World War II. Yet their
message must not be forgotten. Another generation is rising--one that will
rule the nations and which needs renewed respect for human life. Author
Milton Nieuwsma, who compiled stories of three Holocaust children,
remarked that “it is the living who speak for the dead…To turn away is to
kill them a second time. But to listen is to confront the monster that
lurks deep in the human soul” (150).
The monster of indifference is more lethal than gas chambers, machetes or
crashing jetliners. We must fight it by continuing to re-tell the dark
stories of all holocausts, even the unheralded past and present killings.
Only that perspective can help us turn memory into peaceable solutions
that return hope to history.

Works Cited

Gourevitch, Philip. We wish
to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our
families. New York: Picador USA, 1998.

Nieuwsma, Milton. Kinderlager: An Oral History of Young Holocaust
Survivors. New
York: Scholastic, 1998.